Menu

Usability

Facebook wants you to see more serious news, and fewer meme photos. Of all the posts your friends create and share, soon your news feed will be less likely to show you “a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook,” and more likely to show you a news story your friends have commented on. Facebook wants to keep you occupied on-site, giving you fewer chances to leave its own enchanted…

Arent you glad you didnt cite to this webpage in the Supreme Court Reporter at Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 131 S.Ct. 2729, 2749 n.14 2011. If you had, like Justice Alito did, the original content would have long since disappeared and someone else might have come along and purchased the domain in order to make a comment about the transience of linked information in the internet age. via 404…

I was horrified to see that, in order to opt out of pre-approved credit mailings, the bottom-feeders known as Equifax, Experian, Innovis, and TransUnion expect us suckers to type our SSN and birthdate into an online form, which we then are expected to print out and mail. I tried typing “000-00-MYOB” and “000-00-0000″ into the SSN form, but my application was rejected. Then I noticed that the form doesn’t actually…

Words many of us never want to hear: “It’s the transmission.” “We can’t get a technician out there until next Tuesday.” “Your ex will be there.” And, of course: “Welcome to our redesigned site!” –Why I Resist Web Redesigns (And Maybe You Do, Too) : Monkey See : NPR.

I spent more time than I’d like to admit this summer redesigning my WordPress website. The new theme emphasizes thumbnails, which are very easy to create on an iPad or handheld and upload via the WordPress iOS app. Most important for me, though, is the fact that this new theme is responsive — that is, it arranges the content in a manner that is useful for very narrow screens through…

I have in the past griped on Twitter and on my blog about the clunky Turnitin.com web-based interface. You have to do so much clicking and dragging and typing and waiting for the screen to refresh, and there are places where the “delete” button appears right where an “OK” button was a second ago, so if you click out of sync with the screen you can delete a whole category…

Moodle is a free course-management tool that many schools (including mine) use to manage the online components of courses (including computer-graded quizzes, discussion forums, and the submission of online papers). The tool is powerful, but the interface offers a bewildering array of options, so that casual users are often dismayed by how many checkboxes it takes to configure an operation that seems like it should be a simple thing. Overheard…